


Don't look at the God of Death in the Eye

by Ink-and-stars (AriasOfSnow)



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Shinigami, M/M, Romance, reaper au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-08-07 08:13:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7707541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AriasOfSnow/pseuds/Ink-and-stars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chanyeol would have never expected the Reaper to be a boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miranda (?)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Miranda+%28%3F%29).



> Reaper!AU series of drabbles. They all belong to the same universe and have some sort of continuity, but can be more or less read as standalones, and are not exactly a chaptered story, just some kind of universe I will be coming back to when I am bored.
> 
> Since this is not a full-fledged chaptered story, but just something to do to relax, I don't plan to update this regularly, but most probably between other fics. I am just putting them together because after all they belong in the same AU.
> 
> So enjoy!

 

**Look at the God of Death in the eye  
.**

Chanyeol hadn't expected Death to look so young. It had always been the skeleton in a cloak in his mind, a terrorizing shadow who would come and take him, scythe in hand, eternal smile frozen in its bony face. He would had never suspected the Reaper to be a boy - hair black, face pale and eyes of the most piercing grey, but a boy nonetheless, looking mildly displeased as he gazed at his fallen figure from above.

"You're staring," he commented.

"And what do you want me to do? It's not like you can kill me," Chanyeol replied. He tried to shrug and part of himself (his mind, perhaps?) followed the command, but his body didn't move. It was strange, so much like being trapped in his own useless flesh and bone. "Haven't you come to take me?"

"Have I?" The boy tilted his head, black bangs falling over his eyes. He totally looked like one of the fanboys who came to Chanyeol's band concerts sometimes, with his leather pants and chiffon shirt and messy make-up, but of course no fan of his had ever held a tall, steely scythe in his slender fingers, or had stood dressed like a rock-and-roll groupie in the middle of the snow, no cold puffs of breath coming out from his lips. He was a ghost of black and white and grey, the same way that Chanyeol was a blur of sable and crimson; the deep red of his blood on the floor. Death and the corpse he had come to claim as his. "You weren't on my list. Not tonight."

"Not that I was counting to be." Chanyeol laughed, and wondered if his face was moving, contorted by the sudden outburst of if it remained frozen, like the rest of him. "You see, I was heading home from a gig and suddenly... boom! Something's hurting and then I've fallen. Gone. Dead. I've bled out on the floor and then you appear and are looking at me like I annoy you."

"Don't you know what did it?"

"What?"

"Kill you."

"I-- No? I was hoping for you to tell me?"

The Reaper boy looked deep in thought for a while, piercing eyes closed, bottom lip trapped between his lips. He was pretty, for a last sight; looked as ephemeral as a last breath should. "You weren't on my list," he repeated. "The same as the other ones. You have been killed but you weren't supposed to be."

"What does that even mean?"

"I--" The boy looked at Chanyeol again, but frowned and tsk-ed soon after. "Do you want to live?" he suddenly asked, and then his lips curved into a smile. It was weird, Chanyeol thought, because both his voice and his face became soft, but his eyes hardened. "Don't you have dreams? Hopes? Something? Most of them beg when I come: they ask for one more day, for one more hour, for one more minute."

"And does that help them?" Chanyeol asked in return, voice a whisper. Of course he wanted to return, to close his eyes and wake up back at the messy room of the apartment he shared with his friends. He would scream for them until they all came rushing to his bed, only to prove they could hear him. He would phone his mother after, to hear her voice like a scared kid after a bad dream. But he seriously doubted that would happen. Not that easily.

"Not usually, no," the Reaper boy confirmed. "But perhaps it would help you."

He moved after that, graceful as a predator, silent as a prayer and still smiling like an angel would. Straddling him, with his silver scythe sunk on the snow, close to where Chanyeol's neck was, and both hands wrapped over the metal, so softly that their grip looked more like a caress.

"I could offer you a year," he continued. "And not just a year, but //the// year. Fame? St the grasp of your hand. Money? All you could spend. Lovers? Every single person you wanted. Whatever your dreams are, you would achieve them. You would had me at your side, and I will serve you the world in a silver platter. Only if you ask nicely, of course."

Chanyeol willed his dead body to move to no avail. Perhaps it was better like this, after all, because he didn't what he would have done, had he been able to make his limbs obey - to pull the boy atop him and beg or to push him away from where he was.

"I thought you have come for my soul," he said in the end, as his voice was the only part of him he could still control. "Why are you looking for a bargain instead?"

"Because it interests us both."

"And what's the price for me?"

"Yours?" The Reaper boy grinned again. He looked so overly satisfied, unblemished over the soiled snow. "Does it have to be a price?"

"There always is."

"So you're clever." The boy covered his smirk with a pair of long, slim fingers. "Very well, Park Chanyeol, I want your soul. But I already had that, didn't I? What I am willing to do is hold my claim on it for a year, 365 days for your cooperation."

"My _cooperation_."

"I'm being played, you see, by whatever... thing that killed you and let you here for me to find on the snow. So I am joining their game. I am making a stand."

Chanyeol snorted. "You're using me as bait."

The other boy's fingers traveled to his chest, then to his side, where the wound that had killed him was. They grazed the broken flesh and still Chanyeol felt nothing.

"Help me and live as the king of the world or go peacefully and in ignorance. I am just giving you the choice," Reaper boy whispered then.

Chanyeol made the effort too look at him in the eye. To stare at Death right in its face and not shy away, even if part of him still thought that his face was too pale, and his smile was too soft, and his eyes were too grey and hard as steel. "Aren't you going to make me beg for it?"

The boy's laughter sounded almost genuine. "Only if that's your thing."


	2. Trouble under control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baekhyun had always preferred ballads over rock shows.

**Trouble Under Control**

The stadium had lit up, all colored beams, and pyrotechnics and fancy illumination. All flashy and ostentatious, that show was, as humans in general were and as Park Chanyeol, in particular, had always been since Baekhyun knew him.

"I'll give you fame," the Reaper boy had told him, back then, months ago, when Chanyeol was little more than a man-child dressed in torn jeans and old leather and bleeding to death on the snow. Baekhyun had been certain that he would accept his deal from the start - Park Chanyeol seemed more curious than scared, but curiosity had brought as many disgraces upon mankind as fear, and that Baekhyun knew too - but he wasn't expecting Chanyeol to seize his chance like this. To take his second opportunity at life and fame and ride it like a wave.

He wanted music, that boy, he wanted the cadence of the guitar riff, the controlled madness of the solo. He wanted to stand on the stage and let the sweat, and the heat, and the chaos  take him away while the crowd screamed for him like his lovers, his children, his legion.

It was noisy as hell. Too messy. The kind of mess, specifically, Baekhyun could had never looked away from, perhaps because he had never been really used to it.

"Last encore!" the band vocalist screamed, and Baekhyun sighed and floated closer to the main stage, his body light as air over the crowd. He knew the singer, some rocker kid with a tendency to scream the lyrics like his life depended on it and with a whole collection of mesh tops and shirts by the name of Jongdae, and he liked him to an extent, but being completely honest he couldn't bring himself to care that much about him, the same way he was mostly indifferent to the rest of Chanyeol's bandmates.

They wouldn't be where they were, after all, if it wasn't for Chanyeol himself. He was the one most of the crowd cheered for, the one who had dragged Baekhyun from bar to bar and from venue to venue demanding him to use his powers so they could get one more concert, one more show. Chanyeol, the boy who had made a bargain with Death. The one who was no-one at twenty five, had reached global stardom at twenty six and who would tragically die at twenty seven, like all legends did.

The main guitarist of White Noise, alone in the center of the stage, surrounded by light and screams and static, fingers dancing on the fret of his Gibson, red hair plastered to his forehead and neck glistening because of the sweat, lips pulled up in a smirk that turned his fans into a shrilling mess when he looked up at them in the middle of his part.

"Showoff," Baekhyun muttered. He had to admit that Chanyeol knew how to own a show, but Baekhyun himself was more of a ballad fan. They sounded much better at funerals, after all, and that whole rock concert thing reeked a bit too much of life for his taste. There hadn't been electricity, back in the time before he got his scythe, and the way the whole world had been changing without him being a part of it anymore was... disconcerting, sometimes.

"Employee Byun," a voice called to him then, just while Chanyeol was very busy falling to his knees in the climax of his solo and Baekhyun was very immersed observing how inappropriate for minor fans all that scene probably was. "I was looking for you."

"Ah, really?" The boy would have known that voice everywhere. It reminded him to bureaucracy, his more disliked thing in the world - or maybe the second one, after certain... stuff he didn't want to talk about. He floated lazily to get a bit closer to the stage, but finally tore his eyes away from Chanyeol and White Noise and waved to the newcomer. "Hi, boss."

Kim Junmyeon was every inch what a Death Department civil worker should be those days. He owned a collection of perfectly ironed black suits, with perfectly matching black ties and, of course, two or three expensive-looking black, hooded cloaks for special occasions. He wasn't wearing one of those now, thank the stars, just his usual jacket, shirt and trouser combo, paired up with dark, very polished dress shoes. All prim and proper as always, of course, perfectly appropriate for a rock show.

Baekhyun snorted.  "I see you come prepared to mingle with the crowd," he commented. As if they had listened to him, the fans below them roared, low and raw, and Junmyeon grimaced.

"They can't even see me. They are too alive for that," he replied, back stiff even as he floated in mid-air. "It's not them I come to visit."

"I assume as much." Baekhyun yawned, stretching his hand to summon his silver scythe, just because he liked feeling the cold steel on his palm - especially when he was most possibly about to be reprimanded by authority. "What's wrong today? Did I forget to hand in some reports? I will do so by Monday, if it's that. You know I forget that kind of stuff when I'm tired after field work."

"It's not that, even if you should take care of your written reports, for the record," Junmyeon said. "It's only that the bosses want to know..." The other man took held his breath for a while, then shook his head. "Byun, is this all necessary? All this show, all these--"

"Pyrotechnics and noise? It is totally unnecessary if you ask me, but it's useful. The most perfect bait you could ask for, isn't it?"

"I'm not really sure about that..."

"Oh, come on. Wouldn't you be at least a little bit intrigued, if you were whoever it is who has been stealing our human souls? You kill a human boy and fail to eat his spirit for some reason, and months later he is not only alive but on every TV program, music show, and neon sign on the skyscraper walls. I would be thrilled, if it was me. Aching to devour him."

"He's just another human boy."

"Well, he's hot. When he wants to be, at least. He serves his purpose."

"Baekhyun--"

"What? It's under control." The boy smiled, his most charming, wicked grin, and proceeded to backflip on the air until he was floating on his back, silver scythe resting on his shoulders and eyes on the sweaty shape of Park Chanyeol, breath irregular on his lips, life pulsing off him like it was a tangible thing. Hard and wild and delicate. "There's only some months left, remember? Half of the time he borrowed. In the worst case scenario, I'll get our kid's soul in less than a year and we'll find another way to solve this whole mess after. Trust me a little, okay? I am your most trusted employee. When have I failed either you or the Reapers?"

Junmyeon cleared his throat, his lips curving up in a faint smile. "Do you want a list, Byun?"

The boy laughed. "You all love me anyway."

Baekhyun didn't know to what extent Junmyeon was - or not - convinced, but his boss, at least, seemed resigned enough to let him get away with murder. "Half a year," he said, while the sound of the electric guitar below them reverberated over the bass and voice and drums until it faded into noise. "If you succeed you'll get a well-deserved promotion. If not..."

"If not, I will live with that. Or, you know, I’ll keep being dead with it."

\--

Baekhyun was floating around the dressing room when Chanyeol came in after the show, so close to the ceiling that he could had leaned his head on it, had he wanted. The other boy didn’t see him when he entered, all alone, and Baekhyun waited where he was while he tossed his black leather jacket on the sofa and then proceeded to start unbuttoning his shirt. Well, all of Park Chanyeol’s fans would be so jealous if they knew - he probably was the only person in the whole stadium who hadn’t bought a ticket (or even screamed) and there he was, getting a whole, rated, private show.

“I am seeing you there, Baekhyunnie,” a deep voice suddenly called, and Baekhyun shifted his gaze to meet Chanyeol’s eyes.

“Of course you are seeing me here, you know I am always around.”

“i know you need to be technically close to where I am, but I don’t think that the bound that ties your soul to mine requires you to be in my dressing room while I change? You have been farther away, other times.”

“And what if I don’t want to be?” Baekhyun shrugged, pirouetting on the air just because he could before landing on his two feet, graceful as a cat. “It’s not like I was ogling you, Chanyeol. You actually own me your body, considering that without my help you would be ashes and dust by now.”

“Well, this fix is temporary.” Chanyeol grinned, turned his back at Baekhyun and proceeded to change shirts. He owned a black hoodie collection, all of them too old and a little big on him, and the Reaper boy still felt surprised sometimes at how young and how ordinary they made him look. “But since you have been floating around this place instead of sleeping or something… Does this mean you have watched my show?”

Baekhyun always did. “Perhaps.”

“And how was it?”

“Troublesome.”

Baekhyun remembered Chanyeol in the snow. It came to his mind often, in fact, both in the middle of White Noise’s shows, and when they both were alone at home, and when Baekhyun was looking through the window at the night sky. He had looked like a fallen rockstar then, so different than the man who made crowds bow before him like a king onstage, a polar opposite than the kid who had turned to face him and was pouting at him only because he hadn’t gotten the praise he wanted. Really troublesome.

“Oh, come on. We got a new setlist for this one! You’re meant to say it was awesome!”

“Am I meant to lie so you can be proud of yourself?”

Chanyeol blinked. Grinned. “Maybe?”

“Terrible. You are impossible.”

“I know,” Chanyeol replied. Then, he moved out of impulse, as if to pat his back in the middle of his joke.

He had done so before, and he never learned, because he still looked mildly confused when his hand went through the space where Baekhyun was as if there was nothing but empty air where he stood. He blinked again, frowning this time, but he composed himself soon - perhaps faster than Baekhyun himself, who had to swallow a very thick, very uncomfortable lump in his throat before smiling.

“Come on, Chanyeol, be careful. You’ll fall on your face one of his days if you keep doing that.”

The other boy shrugged. He still looked a bit perplexed, perhaps, but not affected. “I just forget sometimes that you are…”

“What? Intangible?”

“You look too solid to be that ghostly.”

“Well, consider that you can’t go around patting Death in the back.”

He had tried to sound all nonchalant and nice (your friendly neighbor, the Reaper!) but perhaps there was something in his voice, because Chanyeol bit his lip and sighed. Baekhyun tried to think about something to say, even if normally he wasn’t especially bothered by the silence, but he was distracted by Chanyeol pulling the hood of his sweater over his bangs, and then the other boy was already tilting his head and speaking.

“What’s with the cane?” he asked.

Baekhyun had actually forgotten he was carrying a silver staff around, even if it wasn’t technically, 100% a staff. He had been just trying to experiment, after Junmyeon had left. He had powers for a reason, after all, and using them to shapeshift stuff relaxed him sometimes.

“This?” he said. “Don’t you recognize it? Looks like a cane, it’s actually a scythe. Smaller and more practical than a thing that is actually bigger than I am.”

“Well, being bigger than you is not hard.”

“Excuse me.”

“Why a cane, though?”

Baekhyun shrugged. “It’s fancy. Don’t you think so?”

“It looks innocent enough for a weapon of death,” Chanyeol replied. He was completely ready to get out of the dressing room now, nothing of the sexy rockstar and totally, completely a boy - pretty much alive, with shiny eyes and slightly colored cheeks - and for a moment Baekhyun though he would be careless once more and try to grab his shoulder, or to ruffle his hair like he did to his bandmates after a show, but he did not. “I’m gonna go drinking with the guys,” he said instead, playful smile on his lips. “So since you can’t leave my side and all, I guess you’re coming too. Unless you’re tired? We can go home if you are.”

“Do you know who are you talking to? I never am.”

“Even if my friends can’t see you. Truly hardcore.”

“Much more than you will ever be, boy.”

There were many things Chanyeol didn’t know, and that he was better not knowing. Like how bars were too chaotic sometimes, just like rock shows were, with too much music and noise and human souls pulsing in all shapes and colors, or how Baekhyun secretly enjoyed them anyway, because there was something that was somehow, kinda, low-key satisfying about Chanyeol laughing a bit too loud and acting like a drunken idiot with his friends.

But the other boy could not know that, the same way he could not know that his powers went further away than just making his body able to float and turning scythes into canes.

He thought about it for a moment - Chanyeol’s hand, piercing the air. Then he shook his head and grinned.

“Are you taking me somewhere or not?”


	3. Vanilla with a hint of sulfur

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chanyeol would had made the same decision, over and over again, to have the world at his feet, and Baekhyun floating at his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Third part of this, and this one is for Baekarime who kinda wanted something like this, I guess (perhaps with even more pinning but that will come... eventually)

**Vanilla with a hint of sulfur**

 

It was the same, lately, every single time.

Chanyeol had enjoyed it at first, and part of him still did - the lights, the music, the calloused tips of his finger on the guitar strings. He used to say as a child that he had been born to be the star of the show, to become one with the melody and the beat, and he had known, as he stood on his first big stage, that perhaps he had been forced to make a contract with Death to achieve his dreams, but he finally was where he deserved.

He didn’t repent. He didn’t regret it. He hadn’t had other choices after all. Baekhyun had clearly told him while he lied on the snow: he had already been gone. It was either a one year extension or just… the end.

So he would had made the same decision, over and over again, to have the world at his feet, and Baekhyun floating at his side, like some kind of self-important little ghost in skinny jeans, but sometimes, when the music was off and his bandmates and staff had drank enough and gone home, he was left to think by himself and to wonder how unfair all that was. How ridiculously stupid.

“Park Chanyeol,” a voice called to him, and he couldn’t help the bitter smile because of course he recognized who it was. “You look kind of pitiful. Shouldn’t you head home instead of being here all alone?”

“I? Don’t you mean we?” The boy took a gulp of the can of beer he still held. It was disgustingly warm by now, but it wasn’t like he cared. He had to admit he was the sad kind of drunk, but he tried to appear cheerful anyway. “If I am not mistaken, and to be honest I doubt it after all these months, you can go very far away from where I am. That’s why you watch all my shows, even if you don’t enjoy them.”

Baekhyun had been floating above his head, but he landed before him, silver cane in hand and pucker on his lips. His hair was messy that night, falling over his eyes in some sort of carefully arranged disarray. Chanyeol had to fight the urge to comb his fingers through it, even though he already knew that he would had only grabbed air, had he tried something so stupid.

“I don’t dislike them as much as you think,” the Reaper boy replied with an impish grin. “But haven’t you considered making an acoustic version of, like, eighty percent of your songs? You could do it for me, you know?”

Chanyeol sighed, “I’ve done too much for you already. I think.”

His tone hadn’t been accusatory at all, but Baekhyun’s smile fell from his lips anyway, turning into something akin to worry. “What? Are you drunk and whiny again? I am serious, Chanyeol. You shouldn’t be alone drinking at night on the street.”

“Am I? Alone?” The boy rose his left had to softly point at Baekhyun, and shrugged when he didn’t reply. “It’s not like some can happen to me. I’m close to home, am I not? On a bench at the private park close to my high-security apartment complex. And it’s a summer night, so I don’t think I’ll die from a heatstroke. I’m perfectly safe. I am not on your death people list, right?”

It almost looked like Baekhyun was going to check for a moment. Chanyeol knew where he kept the thing, folded and hidden in the back pocket of those ridiculously skinny jeans he liked to wear. He checked it sometimes, when he believed Chanyeol was sleeping, and read the names on it over and over again.

“You’re not there,” he finally admitted, kneeling in front of him, however, studying his face with those grey, piercing eyes. “But you weren’t there either, that first time.”

“Well, it something attacks me now, it would help the purpose of all this thing we’re doing, right? I am here as human bait after all. Let the monsters come at me, I am all theirs.”

“You suddenly sound much less dramatic and much more excited.”

“I would be disappointed if nothing tries to eat me in this whole year.”

“Reckless, aren’t we?”

“Perhaps I have a death wish.”

“So what does that mean, in our situation? That you’re wishing for me?”

“Wishing for you like one would wish upon a star. Hah.” It sounded stupid and Chanyeol laughed. He looked up just in time to see Baekhyun stand up and look at him, face pale and pink lips parted. “Aren’t you the one who had given me what I wanted?”

“Oh. I guess.” Chanyeol was still sitting on a bench in the middle of the empty park, and Baekhyun sank his cane on the gravel of the path before it like he was a dancer preparing for a show. Each of his movements were so fluid - like water and air and most things unreachable - but there had always been something conceptually mystifying about Death after all. “Fame, health and money. Like the genie of the lamp.”

“For a year.”

“For a year.”

“And what happens after?”

“If nothing comes to eat you, you mean?” Baekhyun asked, and grinned when Chanyeol nodded. “Well, then your soul will be mine.”

“And you will, what? Eat it?”

“Me?” Baekhyun laughed, a bit incredulous - and perhaps, in Chanyeol’s delusional imagination, a little flirty, too, like the idea was even appealing. “I am a Death Department civil worker, I can’t eat people just like that! My boss would kill me, so nah. I collect souls, and then take them to the Reapers for Judgement.”

Chanyeol opened his mouth to ask if all those Death Department workers were the same Baekhyun was, with the playful smile, and black jeans, and snow-white skin so soft looking under the openings in the sleeves of his chiffon shirt. He supposed he was drunk enough to comment on the other’s boy lack of a seemingly proper dresscode for working, but perhaps he was a bit too much under the influence, and that was why he made another question instead. “And what’s after all that?”

“After all what?”

“After that judgement. After your bosses or whoever it is eats me.”

“No one is technically going to eat you, Chanyeol,” Baekhyun replied, almost reprimanding. He was still smiling, however, not as dangerous as he had seemed when the boy had met him in the snow, but familiar, a little warmer in a sense. “Judgement will decide if your heart has been good or evil, and once your soul has been sorted, it will move on.”

“Move on where?”

The air didn’t even move when Baekhyun sat beside him on the bench, silver cane between his legs. “That’s--” he started, and then he stopped, licking his lips. A moment later, he was blinking an eye at him and smiling. “I am not allowed to tell. I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

Chanyeol snorted. “Do you even know?”

“Of course I--”

“Or you actually don’t?” Chanyeol had said it just for the sake of teasing, but he laughed out loud when Baekhyun looked up at him like he had discovered his darkest, deepest secret. “So you don’t have the sightless idea!”

“Because I am not the boss! I was just given a scythe and told to Reap.”

“Who am I to question you? Your jobs looks so cool.” Chanyeol guffawed and forgot, like he always did. Missed to remember that Baekhyun looked more like a hard-rocker than he did, when he wasn’t on a stage, but that he actually hated his style of music. That he looked so solid but everyone else passing by would believe Chanyeol was a poor, lonely drunken man talking to himself because Baekhyun was and wasn’t there. And that no matter how many times he tried to pat his back, or to grab him by the wrist, or to move those messy bangs away from his eyes, he could not do it.

There was air, only air, when Chanyeol tried to close his fingers on Baekhyun’s shoulder, and he suddenly remembered that he was drunk as fuck, and sad because of reasons, and that the other boy was pretty, and lovely, but he was also kind of far away.

“I just think,” he said, and he realized when he shook his head that he was feeling dizzy, “that all this is stupid. I can’t help it.”

“Chanyeol?”

“It’s just-- I chose my fate, you know? And I chose it because I was so young, and suddenly all I wanted was gone, and you looked so good over me, telling me to grab your hand and accept it. There was fame, and success, and money, and all of that I got but there was another reason. Something I was running away from.”

Baekhyun was pursing his lips again, like a curious child, but his eyes were focused and attentive. Older than the rest of him looked, in a sense. “What was it?” he asked, like he already knew.

“Oblivion,” Chanyeol replied, and it was the first time he said it out loud, and he never had felt so free. “I wanted to make a difference. I wanted people to have me in their minds. I didn’t want to be forgotten.”

“But didn’t you manage that, already? Didn’t I give it to you?”

The beer was still too warm, but Chanyeol didn’t care as he finished his can. He felt tipsy and clumsy and stupid, about to fall to the floor on his face when Baekhyun couldn’t even grab him. “Maybe I did,” he whispered. “But only temporarily. People sing my songs today, but they will find another tune to scream at next year. They will forget Park Chanyeol ever was after I’m gone.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” Baekhyun muttered after a pause. “It doesn’t really matter if you have one year, or one hour, or one minute.”

“I know,” Chanyeol replied, and he closed his eyes. “But I still don’t want to die.”

\--

Chanyeol didn’t know where he was or what was happening, exactly. He had just wanted to rest, to fall asleep in that stupid private park in the middle of his high security apartment complex. He was the rock superstar after all, it didn’t really matter if he was a good kid deep down, because everyone would take for granted that famous guitarist did stuff like drinking too much, or wait for the morning alone and wasted until someone else came to take them home.

It happened to him too while he was half sitting, half lying on the bench, between consciousness and sleep. Someone came for him, and cursed out loud while he tried to make him stand up, and called his name to make him walk. It should have been Jongdae but it didn’t sound like him, and neither he felt like his friend - this person was thinner, and his skin was colder; impossibly soft when Chanyeol hid his face in the crook of his neck.

“Come on, move, Park Chanyeol,” a voice whispered, and he thought he recognized it, because he would have recognized that voice anywhere, but there were fingers on his skin and that was impossible. “The things I do for you. I cannot believe.”

He forced his body to move, back to his building, then into the elevator, up into his apartment. Then he was lying on his bed, still dressed, and it was a very proper place because he was still most possibly dreaming.

“Baekhyunnie?” he called, the nickname a guilty pleasure on his lips, and he felt the weight of someone else on the mattress, sitting close to where he was already closing his eyes.

“It’s true that I don’t exactly know what happens after judgement, but it can’t be anything bad, for someone like you. You’re a nice boy,” the voice in his dream said. “But of course I wouldn’t know. I chose this job because I didn’t want to find out, you know? I was scared to death of just… disappearing. I was never a saint, and this was much better than being gone.”

Chanyeol would have liked to say something else, to grab the other person’s hand now that he felt he could. He would have told him he had cheated on him, that he had played the ghost when he seemed completely solid now. He would have said that he smelled kind of nice, like vanilla with a hint of sulfur.

But he did not, and he couldn’t, because his eyes were closed and he was losing consciousness, too tired to move and too drunk to remember.

Perhaps the Baekhyun in the dream had been counting on that before he spoke, too.


	4. Every whisper (of every waking hour)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baekhyun should had been prepared

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fourth part of Reaper!AU. So I am not accepting requests about this universe anymore (besides the ones I got) because I will be already starting to close it to focus on Codename instead. Expect around 4 drabbles more, maybe 5, and it will be over, so we are halfway through the AU right now! This is the most word-vomity drabble of the bunch, so excuse me if it's just weird! Unbetaed as usual so please tell me if you find any typo!
> 
> Also, I know I have a couple of comments left to reply but please wait a couple of hours for me :'D

**Every whisper (of every waking hour)**

“You should be prepared,” Junmyeon had told Baekhyun one night, during those hours before the morning came when Chanyeol was fast asleep and the other boy felt too tired to wander away on his own, and too sad to watch him sleep. “There have been deaths again in our zone. Humans souls gone. The bosses are worried.”

“Do the bosses know what is causing it? It’s all the Death Department not knowing or it is just us?”

“I think the bosses have their suspicions.”

“So it _is_ just us.” Baekhyun sighed, stretching out his limbs like a sleepy cat. He liked his current hiding place the most inside of Chanyeol’s apartment - or at least he was _partially_ inside. The first time Chanyeol had seen him there, sitting on the thin metal railing of the external emergency stairs, he had looked almost scared. _It’s too cold out here,_ he had told him, because it was still winter then. _And you could fall. We are on a sixth floor!_

Of course, Junmyeon most possibly was the nicest boss a Reaper could ask for (even if he kept wearing those stupid, perfectly ironed full suits) but he would never tell Baekhyun to be careful, no matter how unstable the red railing looked. After all, he knew that none of his employees could die a second time.

“We only need to fix things and then hand our reports. It’s not really required for us to ask questions.”

“Oh, the thrilling life of the civil worker,” Baekhyun replied with his most playful, charming smile. He leaned forward, the warm summer wind on his face, and for a moment he was tempted of letting go of the railing and let the gravity pull him down. He had always thought the fall was thrilling - that one second when you seemed suspended in mid-air, between the sky and the ground, between life and death - and it wasn’t like he couldn’t stop himself and float back up before the crash. “You couldn’t leave the reports out of this, now could you?”

“Informing the Reapers is important. So we can avoid what happened to your rocker boy to take place again. Doesn’t that give you an incentive?”

“To fill reports? Nah.”

“To work harder on this. You look like you lack motivation lately.”

“Do I?” Baekhyun laughed, even though Chanyeol’s pleading expression that one night, weeks ago, came to his mind. _I don’t want to die,_ he had said. And Baekhyun didn’t want him to, either. “I am as good as ever.”

“It would help your boy, if you--”

“He is not _my_ boy, he’s just my… What I thought was a good idea.”

“Ah, but it was,” Junmyeon said, and Baekhyun’s hands gripped the railing, harder this time. If there was something that he had learned over time it was that his boss _was_ nice, but he didn’t spare compliments often. He just came, handed his orders to him and left for the Death Department. “The Reapers have… expectations on you two.”

“Do they?”

“Yes, so keep up the good work.”

Baekhyun glanced up, past the emergency exit, and the railing and the other buildings in the apartment complex and glanced at the city beyond. All that night and noise and human souls that perhaps slept for a few hours a day but never completely rested. _What is killing you all? What would kill someone like Chanyeol, who didn’t want to go so soon?_

“We haven’t done anything. Not yet.”

“He’s everywhere. On TV, on magazines and even on the news. People love him. He couldn’t have gotten more attention, employee Byun, he is the city’s golden boy, and you’re here to watch over him.”

“Am I?”

“You’re doing well, so make us proud.”

“Yes, boss.” Baekhyun bit his lip, and watched Junmyeon wave at him (so stiffly, like he was the Queen of England or something; ridiculous but endearing) before he disappeared in a puff of smoke. He had agreed because he felt like there was anything else he could do, and sighed, eyes on the floor, as he finally jumped from the railing to the metal floor of the emergency stairs, and then proceeded to walk back in.

The sun was about to come out, and the world was still dark but not quite. The light was there already, invading everything, chasing the shadows of the night away and softly illuminating Chanyeol’s face as he slept, lying on his bed, covers tossed away, breath calm and eyelashes fluttering.

What was he dreaming about, Baekhyun wondered, when he mumbled and whispered inconsistencies at night? Reapers didn’t sleep, so it had been years since he had woken up smiling after a nice dream or screaming after a nightmare. And Chanyeol didn’t usually rouse from slumber before the morning came, but he tossed in his sleep, sometimes, and he spoke, so he had to be dreaming, like all humans did.

He was just too tired to wake up, even when what he saw was not pleasant. And it was normal, because Chanyeol had been trying to live so hard, every hour and every moment and every second, even from the moment Baekhyun had to carry him home. The Reaper boy wasn’t sure if he liked all that or not.

“So you’re back,” a voice said then, and Baekhyun turned towards the bed only to see Chanyeol staring at him, his eyes enormous and shiny in the break of the dawn. “I woke up before and went to get a glass of water. And you were outside, talking to someone I couldn’t see.”

Baekhyun shrugged, grinning, and went to sit on the bed. “My boss,” he explained. “You know he comes to check on me sometimes. You are not exactly losing on anything, by not knowing how he looks. The suits he wears were probably absolutely trendy in 19th Century England. I think he believes that looking like an outdated vampire just out of his coffin makes him look imposing.”

“And it doesn’t?”

“Nah, it makes him look like a weird accountant.”

“The accountant of Death.” Chanyeol snickered. For a moment it seemed that his hand was going to move, but it finally remained still on the mattress, and Baekhyun’s eyes flickered from his fingers to his face. “What did he want, though? Did he come to scold you?”

“Scold _me?_ Of course not! He came to praise me! Or, well, maybe praise us. For doing a good job so far.”

“But did we do something?” Chanyeol replied, covering his lips with his fingers to stifle a yawn. He looked young like that, younger than the twenty six years he had, and Baekhyun had to remind himself that his fingers would only find air if he tried to run them through the messy locks over his forehead.

“Apparently your face is everywhere, and that’s a good thing.”

“Well, I am the shiniest star in the city sky,” said Chanyeol. And blinked an eye at him. _Blinked._ “It’s expected of me.”

“My bosses think you have many talents, it seems. Apparently humility wasn’t one of them.”

“Humbleness is not for rock guitarists. It doesn’t go well with our stage personas.” There was the faintest trace of a joke in Chanyeol’s voice when he spoke, but Baekhyun couldn’t read beyond his smile when he got up, until he was sitting on the mattress, looking at the sun peeking through the buildings at the other side of the window on the wall. That was something useful, as of lately - Baekhyun thinking he could, but not being able to read Chanyeol at 100%. “So we’ll keep your bosses happy, Baekhyun. I’ll do what they want, and what it’s expected of me. I’ll live harder, and play louder. I’ll shine brighter and love until my heart stops beating.”

Baekhyun blinked. “Love?” he repeated. He hadn’t seen that coming. It was true that Chanyeol was famous, but he wasn’t _that kind_ of rockstar. “As in what? Falling in love? Or having sex?”

Chanyeol’s laughter was clear, strangely loud in the heavy silence before the dawn. “Who knows? Both? Or neither? Romance is dead, and rock and roll is, too. As you are, and I’ll be.”

It sounded so vague, and Baekhyun swallowed. “That’s kind of stupid. I don’t understand.”

Chanyeol wasn’t looking at him, but his fingers clenched on the mattress when he replied. “Neither do I sometimes, Baekhyunnie. Neither do I.”


	5. Familiar taste of poison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was easy to let oneself go when you didn't want to think but wanted to feel before it all was over. It was also easy to make Baekhyun upset.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fifth part of Reaper!AU. And shit is about to go down. Soon. Title comes from Familiar Taste of Poison by Halestorm.

**Familiar taste of poison**

It was easy to let oneself go when you didn’t want to think but needed to feel before it all was over.

That was what everyone expected of Chanyeol after all. He was the king of the world, a million seller. He was rich and good looking and wanted by girls and boys alike. His name was on everyone’s lips, and people would have frowned if he stayed at home, if he didn’t party, if he didn’t invite his whole crowd to one round of drinks, and then another. Fame had never been made for good boys.

Summer left as silently as it had arrived, and autumn came wrapped in colors, and loud music, and oblivion. Chanyeol only stopped at home to sleep for a few hours a day, enough to stay lucid and awake until the night that would come next, and Baekhyun had absolutely nothing to say and just floated around him like a tiny ghost with messy hair and a cane, but the other boy knew him enough to realize there was something about his lifestyle that he did not like.

Perhaps that was why Chanyeol did it. Or one of the reasons, at least. To watch Baekhyun frowning at him when he went out with his bandmates again, but looking almost concerned when he thought Chanyeol was not watching.

“You’re gonna die before the year is over if you don’t take care of yourself. Living human beings need to eat and sleep,” he told him sometimes, looking so nonchalant as he looked down at him from up in the air.

“I can resist for a few more months, you know?” Chanyeol always replied.

“People won’t be surprised at all when you kick the bucket after all this.”

“Isn’t that part of the plan as well? It all to seem natural?”

“I suppose so,” Baekhyun whispered. He always did, before sealing his lips and letting him do whatever he wanted.

But there were other times too, when Chanyeol was too tired to move, but too mentally exhausted to let his consciousness drift away and sleep, when he felt Baekhyun cross the room, not as an intangible presence, but as something very akin to a human boy. He could hear the faint noise of his steps on the floor, and his weight on the bed when he sat. The soft cadence of his breath so, so close to his face and the coolness of his fingertips on his forehead sometimes, rearranging his hair.

And Chanyeol wondered, if all that was himself dreaming while he thought he was awake or Baekhyun thinking he slept when he was still conscious. If the Reaper boy still breathed because he needed the air in his lungs somehow or if he just did it out of habit. If his fingers would close around flesh and bone if he moved all of a sudden and grabbed Baekhyun by the wrist. But in the end he doubted, and he never tried, and that fantasy of a touch never lasted more than a couple of minutes. Then, Chanyeol fell asleep for real, and when the sun rose and he woke up, Baekhyun was just floating around like usual, making faces at the alarm clock like he wanted to throw it off the window.

All that was like a very frustrating game, and he felt like he didn’t know the rules. _Can’t he be touched and this is just me imagining what I want or can he be and he’s just hiding it from me because he doesn’t want me to try-- whatever he thinks I’ll try to do if I find out?_

So the days went on, one after another, and the weather turned colder, and Baekhyun started to look a bit out of place again, like the time Chanyeol had met him - a slim figure standing in the middle of a crowd wrapped in sweaters, jackets and scarves, dressed in his usual tight jeans and light chiffon shirt, lips pursed in a pout and cane in hand, like the cold and the chilly gusts of wind didn’t affect him at all, watching as Chanyeol’s band’s crew finished packing up after their last show. Frowning at him again when the other boy took him backstage to speak to him.

“So you’re leaving again?” he asked. “Taking me with you to another of those parties?”

“Ah, this one is the biggest thing of the season. Hosted by a music show, VIP only… Everyone will be there, including TV,” Chanyeol explained, his biggest, most camera-friendly grin plastered on his face.

“Don’t you get tired?”

“Tired of what? I am just making your bosses proud.”

Baekhyun was judging him again, and Chanyeol knew. He would had probably stayed, if the Reaper boy had asked him to. If he had just stopped trying to avoid the topic - something that, of course, Baekhyun never did.

“Oh, I don’t know. You used to have nights to yourself before. You slept for more than three hours, and you… played videogames, and composed songs and all that. Don’t you like that anymore, now that you’re a top star?”

“I still love songmaking the most,” Chanyeol replied with an easy smile. “I might be back at it soon.”

He was, of course, lying. He had always liked the studio in his apartment, but he had felt so trapped the last times he had stepped in that he had lost any urge to go there at all. He made his music to be sang and played in front of a crowd, but soon concerts wouldn’t be a possibility anymore. How could he sit down and produce something for White Noise’s new CD knowing that all that his fans would get would be a posthumous, half finished album? _Poor Chanyeol,_ the kids, and their parents, and the media would say, while his bandmates kept one minute of silence in his commemorative concert. _He was riding atop the wave. Such a talented boy and such a messy lifestyle. These are the last songs he made. Listen to them, the work of a genius._

And he did not need that. Not the elegies, nor the obituaries, much less a memorial exposition or a greatest hits CD. He didn’t want his fans to upload photos of him on their Instagrams on the anniversary of his death.

“You say that, but you will still go partying,” Baekhyun shrugged, maneuvering on the air so he was sitting on his cane, sideways, like a warlock would sit on his broom. Only that he was not a sorcerer. Not a ghost. He was the Grim Reaper, waiting for him, silver scythe in hand while the time slipped from the top to the bottom of the hourglass.

“Chanyeol!” another voice called him, then, and seconds after Jongdae came into backstage, avoiding the props that were still on the floor with a burst of laughter while he held the hand of a pretty, short haired young girl in a red dress. “Here you are! We were about to leave without you.”

The girl’s eyes opened wide. “Oh my God, Park Chanyeol!” she exclaimed. For better or for worse, he had to admit that he got that a lot.

“Hey, I’ve thought that you came with me, not him,” Jongdae playfully protested. He smiled to Chanyeol though, almost apologetically. “She’s got friends, if you want company.”

The boy could hear Baekhyun scoffing, but his expression was completely neutral when Chanyeol checked on him. “I don’t know about that,” he muttered. “But I’ll go with you and the others. Just… wait a sec for me, okay? I owe someone a phone call, I’ll be right there as soon as I finish.”

“Ooooh-kay,” Jongdae smirked at him - knowingly, for some reason - and then turned away and left, taking the girl with him. And once more Chanyeol was left alone with Baekhyun on backstage, among the metal columns and wires and switched off lights, everything that remained after the pyrotechnics and loud music, and that his public never got to see.

“So, do you actually have to phone someone or you were already missing to talk to me without people around thinking you’re crazy?” Baekhyun teased him. He sounded provoking, voice almost a purr, and Chanyeol sighed.

“You’re upset.”

“Oh, come on. Why would I be?”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

There had been a time when Chanyeol had always chosen the quietness of his apartment complex after a show; times when Baekhyun had come floating after him, complaining about the heavy noise of rock music or about his Reaper bosses while Chanyeol laughed and called him Baekhyunnie - because he thought it sounded cute and the other boy had looked so ridiculously surprised the first time he had heard the nickname. Those had been good months, the best a dying man could ask for, but they were somehow gone now. Baekhyun was again playing the provocative death, like he had when they had met, and Chanyeol smiled his best stage grin at him, because he had learned how to be a star, and thus a professional liar.

He was so tired of it all. He wanted Baekhyun back, as he used to be, but at the same time he understood how stupid he was for wishing for something like that so bad. One did not want Death like that. One did not go to sleep wishing for its soft breath on his skin and its cold fingers on his hair.

He understood, yes, and still, it was the first time he did not remain silent and voiced what he wanted to say. Even though he knew Baekhyun and was sure he wouldn’t reply with the truth.

“I can’t be upset,” the other boy replied, lips curved up in a cat-like grin, eyes cold as grey stone. “You’re doing so good. I should congratulate you, no? My oh-so-perfect bait boy.”

“You maybe should but you won’t.”

“Yeah. I won’t,” Baekhyun conceded. He leaned back, until he was laying face down on the air, bangs falling over his eyes as he stared at him. “I asked you before, if you’re not fed-up with all this. Because _I am_. I am so done of babysitting you while we wait for a monster that never arrives. All this was a very bad idea, the worst I could have had. I am certain about that now, and I just want it to be over.”

Chanyeol grimaced, trying to fight the pang in his chest. He didn’t know what he had expected - Death was Death after all, even if its disguise looked a little bit too beautiful for his own good.

“So you want it?” he whispered. It wasn’t exactly what Baekhyun had _said_ , but it certainly was what he had implied. “The monster to come for me?”

The Reaper boy’s body floated down as his eyes opened wide to look at him. He looked clearly taken by surprise. “Chanyeol,” he started, so quietly, so softly, but he didn’t add anything else. He didn’t deny it.

“I am waiting for it, too,” Chanyeol replied. And it was true, to some extent, but he still felt the bitterness of his own words on his tongue, burning with the aftertaste of an all-familiar poison. And he shook his face and gave Baekhyun a smile before he turned around. “But speaking of that, I should be going now. We don’t want to be late and miss those journalists on the photocall, do we?”

Baekhyun landed on the floor looking up at him for the first time in weeks before he replied. “I guess we wouldn’t want that.”


	6. Let the fire burn the ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baekhyun had always chosen to do the easiest thing, especially when he felt like something in his chest was burning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So probably this whole thing will be like 3-4 chapters longer :D

**Let the fire burn the ice**

 

Baekhyun was far away when it happened.

As far as he could, at least. He had been forcing the limits of their bond since that last conversation had happened - since the moment Chanyeol had looked at him in the eye and asked if Baekhyun wanted the monster to come for him.

Chanyeol had left for his party after that. Baekhyun had followed. They hadn’t talked at all that night, nor the following day, nor the other. The other boy had no words for him, and Baekhyun was too used to running away to try to let his own out.

It was easier to sit outside the venue when Chanyeol was clubbing, to float aimlessly on the empty dressing room when he was in the middle of a show. There were few concerts left until the end of the tour, and the only thing Baekhyun wanted was to close his eyes and sleep, like he had done when he was alive, and then wake up already at home.

He wanted to open his eyes and find himself in winter. Winter that year, when it all would be over. Or the winter before, when it had started.

He still could see it, in the back of his mind. The memory came over and over, even if he didn’t want to summon it: Chanyeol, almost a year younger, body wrapped in a green-ugly coat and guitar case hanging from his shoulder, walking through the snow and smiling up at him, cheek red from the cold.

“So do you think they will like me?” he had asked, so young and so innocent then, so happy to have Death helping him like there wasn’t a price at all for their deal. “Those guys at the bars we just visited. Do you think they’ll give us a chance to play there?”

“I told you I would make you famous,” Baekhyun replied, pirouetting on the air to stop in front of him and pout. “You’ll be filling whole venues soon. Have you seen their faces just now?”

“I have!” Chanyeol replied. He looked satisfied with himself, proud as a kid, but there was  _ something  _ in his eyes when he called him next. “But, Baekhyunnie? I’ve been meaning to ask.”

“You shouldn’t  _ Baekhyunnie _ me, but ask what?”

“Do those people suddenly like me because they really think that what my band’s doing is good or because you are making them enjoy it? You know, with your Grim Reaper powers and all.”

He looked so eager to know, so curious. He wanted to please, and to be loved, and to make a difference. And Baekhyun was meant to keep him happy, so he lied, the first time of many. “I am only making them listen,” he said. “They just seem to love what you do once their ears are open.”

Chanyeol had laughed, smile so wide, and Baekhyun had kept floating, stomach suddenly heavy, fingers gripping his cane a bit too strongly. That had also been the first time of many - the start of a new routine in which Baekhyun enchanted Chanyeol’s audience and sponsors and then he felt like a sinner for it. That all should have been okay for him, because Chanyeol didn’t even suspect and was happy, his fame was rising and everything went according to plan, but still Baekhyun couldn’t help to be trapped by guilt, suffocating a bit when he stopped to think about his actions.

He should have known, then. That all that deal was a horrible idea, that there were  _ things  _ about himself that he already couldn’t control.

But still he had ignored them. He had flown around Chanyeol like an oversized black moth, and had watched him smile because he was pretty when he did so, even when he was a fly trapped in a spider web.

“I can make them like you even better, you know? Even faster,” he had lied when the boy had mentioned how fast he was rising to fame, a couple of months later. “You could ask it from me. Demand a last wish from Death, since you are technically dying.”

“I can do that?” Chanyeol asked, turning to look at him from the corner of the room he was crouched in, trying to plug his amp in the only unoccupied socket on the wall. “Do I have a last will of sorts?”

He finished plugging the thing in the too-small socket. Baekhyun made his fingers material and reached down to pull from amp the cable, successfully unplugging it again. Making his fingers material enough to grab things was as easy as blinking, and doing it all of a sudden was always funny, because Chanyeol looked always so surprised. He would have made a great poltergeist, he guessed. Perhaps better than he was a Reaper, considering the situation.

“ _ Maybe _ you have one,” he said. “But are you really gonna use it for fame?”

Baekhyun had half-expected Chanyeol to joke back, but the other boy looked pensive. “Not really. I wouldn’t spend a last wish for something as fake as that,” he had replied after a while. “I want to see how far I can go by myself. To do my best in the time I have left.”

There weren’t many people that Baekhyun admired, but he had felt his chest grow warmer for Chanyeol, back then. That had also been the first time of many - the start of a spark that had grown into wildfire.

That same night, when the concert had started, the boy had floated over the public in silence and had removed all his spells. The very act had been against everything Baekhyun had been taught as a Reaper, it had been a contradiction of his own beliefs, but he had craved to give Chanyeol what he wanted.

He had feared that the show would fail, but the crowd had gone crazy, screamed so loud that Baekhyun had covered his ears while he smiled.

That was the real beginning of Park Chanyeol, the legend. The same boy who had tried to hug Baekhyun after that concert and had fallen on his face because he had forgotten the Reaper boy couldn’t be touched.

It seemed so long ago, now. Those had been good times, before Baekhyun grew anxious and Chanyeol became even more tired than he was, lost in his spiral of sex, drugs and rock and roll while his own personal Reaper just snapped at him and then watched him break into pieces from afar.

_ I could resign, I guess,  _ he thought, floating as the music in the stage above his head grew wilder, a frenzy of riffs and chords. Rock music, white noise. By now he didn’t know if he hated it like he had claimed or if he loved it, perhaps a bit too much.  _ I could tell Junmyeon to take on from here. He would do it. He has always been too nice. _

He considered the possibility, he savored it. It seemed like the easiest option - to be back to his usual routine. Once more to his cheeky Death persona, the boy who would come to take your soul in tight pants and a teasing smile. He only had to raise his hand, snap his fingers. Give up.

And he was about to do it when he heard the guitar stop.

That came before anything else, the sudden change in music. Baekhyun had been beside Chanyeol long enough to know that he never failed when it came to that. When he was on stage he became one with what he did; he was born for that, he was passionate and perfect. So the shiver was already running down his spine, freezing the blood in his veins and the air in his lungs before he felt the temperature drop and the bond between him and Chanyeol tighten.

“What--” he muttered, even if nobody was there to listen how suddenly weak his voice sounded. Even if he already knew what it was. “Oh, no. Not now. Not him. Not  _ here.” _

He couldn’t help but remember, every time, every day, how hard Chanyeol’s eyes had been when he had asked him his question.  _ So do you want it? The monster to come? _

Baekhyun hadn’t replied because the fire in his chest had turned into ice then, as cold as the bone-chilling air in the dressing room was now. But he knew the answer, of course he had always known, and felt more scared than he had ever been as his cane shifted in his hand, growing longer, sharper, as hot to touch as the flickering, living embers of a fire.


	7. When monsters are here to claim you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chanyeol had known it was going to happen eventually

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this thing keeps getting longer and longer. May post another scene soon, since I was originally planning to add it in this chapter after this one but finally did not.
> 
> Note: There's a mention of drug use there somewhere, though it is very vague

**When monsters are here to claim you**

Chanyeol was never alone but he felt lonely.

Lonely as he was dragged from party to party, and as he drank to forget. It was his role, after all, what he had decided he would be, the only thing he could do. The silence was too deep when he was by himself, his room too empty, so it was easier to surround himself with people, laugh out loud with his crew and seek comfort in the arms of strangers. Better that than to face rejection.

He had wanted Baekhyun to notice, but the boy wouldn’t listen. He would had wanted him to look at him, to scold him, to (unsuccessfully) try to punch him but he was nowhere to be found. Even his soft touch at night was gone, and Chanyeol didn’t know if his fingers on his skin had been real or just a dream, but he missed them. Totally, tragically, absolutely.

So he kept going on. It was what he had signed himself for, after all, and the only thing that mattered. Baekhyun was around - invisible to him but close somewhere - and wanted the monster to find him. Chanyeol was barely hanging on but wanted the same as well.

And still, he was surprised when it happened.

He had been in the middle of a concert, fingers on the strings of his guitar, eyes closed, when he felt the cold. It was strange, unnatural, a chill that creeped under his skin and froze him to the marrow of his bones. A claw of sudden fear that trapped the air in his lungs and made his eyelids flutter open.

At first, he didn’t stop playing. His body was too well trained for that; despite all, and his hands always followed the music. And it all seemed normal around him. Usual. His bandmates were following their own thread of melody at his side, the public was still chanting his name and going crazy. This was it, this was all, the life he had wanted.

But then he saw it.

There was smoke. Shadows. Turning and swirling like fog, becoming darker, translucent, material. Rising from the stadium arena like a black, thick cloud, moving upwards and towards him.

“What…?” he muttered, fingers hesitating over the frets of his guitar for the first time in a year. The smoke wasn’t materializing on the fan pit, not exactly. It was coming from the  _ people _ inside of it, not from each one but from many, enshrouding them like a black veil before rising up, up, up like steam, crawling over the frenzied crowd like it was alive and coming straight for him. “No.”

He missed one note, and then the next. The sensible part of his brain was telling him that whatever that smoke was, it couldn’t be real - and even if it  _ was _ real, it shouldn’t be able to hurt him. Mist wasn’t tangible, mist didn’t kill, but still he stepped backwards, eyes wide open, fingers crisped on his guitar.

“Chanyeol?” he thought he heard Jongdae say. He sounded worried, and the boy knew why - for the first time in his life, he had destroyed a song, ended a melody before he was supposed to, killed the music while standing at the center of a crowded stadium. But his friend couldn’t possibly understand. His eyes were unworried and empty as he followed Chanyeol’s gaze to the place where the pulsing black cloud was. He didn’t realize they were in danger.

Or that Chanyeol was, at least.

“Move out!” he screamed, his voice amplified by his mic. The crowd roared in response, as if they though all of that was part of the show, and Chanyeol shook his head and stumbled backwards, trying to rush into backstage, to  _ run. _

But the mist was fast, and clever like a predator, and it had coiled around him like a ghostly shroud before he could even take four steps. He tried to make it go away with his hands, pointlessly shaking them in the air to try to dissipate it, but the smoke grew thicker. He felt the first bite in his neck, as sharp as the slice of a knife, and blood was hot on his fingers when he brought them to his pulsing skin.

He had to move, but it didn’t take him long to realize that he couldn’t, perhaps because he was frozen in place, or maybe because something else was keeping him there, still like a statue.

_ I am going to die, _ he understood. Just like that, for a second time. Without accomplishing anything, without seeing Baekhyun for one last time. This was it - his last breath, his own personal monster.

His only wish would had been...

“Get the fuck away from him!”

Everything happened too fast after that. Something - someone - pushed him, so hard that he fell on the ground. His guitar made a loud, discordant noise, and the crowd beside him stopped screaming, every cheer turning into heavy silence.

And then there he was, his back to Chanyeol and his silver scythe in hand, dressed in full black and standing in the middle of the stage like he was the star who owned that show. The Reaper. Baekhyun.

“You’re here,” Chanyeol muttered, and he realized that there was no smoke around him anymore. Instead, it had moved towards the other boy, encasing him in a ghostly prison and hiding him from his view. “Wait, no!”

For a moment, there was no reply. After that, something inside the thick, black cloud moved - a slash of silver, corporeal moonlight that sliced the smoke in half. Chanyeol struggled to get up, to run towards the mist, but as strong grip on his arm forced him to stop before he could run forward.

“Chanyeol,” a voice called. It was Jongdae, still sweaty because of the stage lights and the show, looking at him with big, worried eyes. He still could not see Baekhyun, he didn’t know a thing. “What’s all this? What’s… wrong with you?”

“Let me go! He’s in danger, I have to--”

“Chanyeol, what are you saying?”

“Get out!”

It was Baekhyun who had spoken, and Chanyeol saw him standing amidst the smoke when he looked back to where he had been. Black tendrils were curling around his arms and legs and torso, but he was free, with his head held high like a prince and his deep, grey eyes locked in his. He barely seemed the same Baekhyun who had floated and spinned around him, pouting like a miniature ghost - this boy was too pale, and too proud: a dancer of shadows who made the twirls of smoke curl into themselves as disappear with every graceful, firm, gash of his scythe.

Perhaps Chanyeol should had been scared of him, but he was mesmerized. He feared the black fog, however, still felt the overwhelming cold trying to paralyze him, but at least he could focus again.

“Didn’t you hear me? Get out!” Baekhyun repeated.

“But I can’t leave you here, I--”

“It’s your soul what this thing is looking for! You’re human, you can’t fight. You’re only distracting me!”

“But I--”

“Take your friends and go backstage!” Baekhyun shouted, looking at him with dark, steely eyes before the cloud of smoke shifted to swallow him. Chanyeol remained where he was, totally still for a while, but soon he was commanding his body to respond and his head to move, expression closed into determination when he looked at Jongdae in the eye.

“We can’t stay here! Let’s go backstage!”

His friend’s grip loosened on his arm. “What’s going on? You’re scaring me. Are you high on something?”

Baekhyun was fighting behind him, cutting through the mist one time, and another, and another one, and Chanyeol could still feel the cold. He didn’t have time to elaborate.

“Maybe I am! I’m not well, call the doctor on me.” He turned towards the crowd then, took Jongdae’s mic from his hands. No one was cheering anymore - the stadium was all-too-quiet, and Chanyeol was only thinking of leaving to give Baekhyun his space. If that was the best he could do… “The concert has been cancelled! Please return home!”

He didn’t wait for a reply, and just dragged Jongdae with him. He could feel his other bandmates trailing behind them, calling his name, but he didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was his bond with Baekhyun, the invisible cord that tied them together tightening as he ran away from the stage.

_ The monster finally appeared,  _ he thought.  _ And Baekhyun came to save me. _

He had looked powerful as he fought, scythe in hand. He had commanded and Chanyeol had obeyed, because it had been the best option for them both; their only one. But he couldn’t help but think - as Jongdae screamed at him, and made him lay down in a sofa to rest, making one hell of a mess while he looked for his phone - that Baekhyun had said that the monster was looking for Chanyeol’s soul, but he had never stated that his own life was safe.

He only hoped that Death was as unstoppable as he seemed.


	8. A dying man's wish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Distance meant pain in more ways than one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter: Implied suicide and implied use of drugs

**A dying man’s wish**

 

Baekhyun was in pain.

He didn’t know what that monster had been, not exactly. He wasn’t precisely the oldest of Reapers, but he hadn’t seen anything like that thing before - dark, immaterial and as cold as a kiss from a corpse. His scythe had worked against it, and he had been able to force the shadows back, dissipate them into nothingness, but the fight had taken a toll on him and he felt about to collapse.

If there was something that he was certain of, now that the fight was over, it was that he would survive. It was impossible for Death to die, but he could vanish: watch as whatever seams held his soul together broke loose and just… fade. Other Reapers would be born to take his place, so it wouldn’t be a great loss for his bosses - nor for anyone, really. But he had refused to surrender, so he had fought against the monster and had won. He should be proud, maybe, but he was walking away from the battle only partially victorious, and with more questions than answers.

What was that thing? Why its touch had felt like icy needles on his skin? Why the shadows that formed him had come from inside living human beings? Chanyeol’s public had kept cheering and screaming at the same time something that came from their bodies had risen to kill their idol. Baekhyun had felt it, when the shadows touched him: pain and despair, swirling around him and then trying to turn him into nothingness. Heavy, frozen air, choking him and stealing his energy, his life, hurting him like the vicious slash of an invisible knife.

He would need to talk to Junmyeon about all that. He needed to ask, needed to know. But right then he couldn’t think. He didn’t exactly require oxygen in his lungs to keep existing, but he felt so tired, so breathless. It had been a long time since he had had personal wishes to spare, but there was an invisible yearning tugging somewhere below his ribs, and a place he longed to be. Or a person, really.

Baekhyun supposed he could allow himself to be self-indulgent. He needed the bond that tied him and Chanyeol together to be able to rest. He needed the bond to heal. Distance meant pain in more ways than one.

He had hoped for Chanyeol to be asleep, but he was wide awake, sitting in the darkness of his luxurious hotel room with his stage clothes still on. Of all the living people on earth, the other man was the only one who could actually see him, always, and so his eyes focused on him as Baekhyun passed through the solid wood of his closed door.

“Ghost room service,” Baekhyun muttered, because he was too tired of feigning anger and Chanyeol wasn’t saying a thing. He would have floated for effect, but his body wasn’t exactly responding. “I’m back. Missed me much?”

_ “Baekhyun.” _

There was some kind of weight in the way the other man said his name, a fervorous certainty that made the boy froze where he was, tentative smile fading and eyes rising to meet Chanyeol’s. He had forced himself not to look for days, weeks even, and now he didn’t exactly know how to do it. To Chanyeol, he couldn’t be much more than a dark silhouette standing very still against his door, but Baekhyun could clearly see him: the world’s top star, with the eyes of a prisoner and the face of a child. He didn’t know what to  _ do. _

“Are you okay?” That was what Baekhyun had wanted to ask, but the words came out of Chanyeol’s mouth instead. It seemed so unfair, that he was the one worrying when Baekhyun had been at fault for leaving him alone until almost the very end.

“You’re safe,” the Reaper boy whispered. “You ran away, so you’re safe.”

Chanyeol was soon getting up, striding across his hotel room until he reached the place where Baekhyun was. He had turned his bedside table lamp on, and the light was dim at most, but it was enough for him to squint a bit and study Baekhyun’s face, the exposed skin of his neck.

“You’re not bleeding,” he said, half stating it, half asking.

“I can’t bleed, remember?”

“But you can be hurt.”

There wasn’t a need in Baekhyun replying, so he kept his mouth shut. He felt the urge to run away, then, to retreat once more and hide from the frantic gleam in Chanyeol’s eyes as he waited for him to speak. He seemed so determined, but he looked so weak: the epitome of the fallen rockstar, with pale, sticky skin and dark circles under his eyes.

His whole body looked at the verge of destruction, and Baekhyun couldn’t understand how he had allowed that to happen when the only thing he had wanted was--

“Don’t look so sad, I’m fine,” Chanyeol said then, bringing him back to reality. “Jongdae thought I was high on something, so he called the doctor on me, then locked me inside my room to rest. Our management will probably cancel part of our upcoming concerts so they can check what’s wrong with me. All the guys were so scared. They thought I was seeing things, that perhaps something was wrong inside my head.”

“Well, you’re seeing me,” Baekhyun whispered. It had been intended to sound as a joke, but he was too tired to fake humor, and Chanyeol looked more distraught than amused.

“I have to admit I sometimes wonder,” he began, in a voice so weak that Baekhyun had to lean forward to listen, “what my doctor would say if I told him how the situation I’m in is. If I explained to him that I died, and then I made a contract with Death, you know? Something like ‘I met the Reaper, sir, and he’s so feisty but kinda cute. He carries a cane around, and floats in the air, and hasn’t been meeting my eyes properly for weeks.’ That kind of thing.”

Baekhyun took in a shaky breath. “He would say you’re crazy.”

“And I am not? I’m in my empty hotel room talking to a Reaper, for God’s sake. I’m shaping my life around the fact that a ghost only I can see promised me success and a year to live! Anyone in their right minds would say I’m mad!”

There should have been anger in Chanyeol’s, a veiled accusation, some kind of bite in his words so Baekhyun could shield himself from them, but instead the other boy had sounded so soft, defeated. Doubtful, even, like a cornered lamb would be when it rose its eyes to look at the wolf for the last time. And Baekhyun felt human again, a devastated boy standing at the edge of a cliff, wondering how much it would hurt if he left himself fall.

It would be so easy. To close his eyes and jump. To tell Chanyeol he had been dreaming all along and fade like the folklore fantasy he was supposed to be. Chanyeol had become a rockstar because he wanted to be remembered; Baekhyun had awakened as a Reaper because he had wanted to be forgotten.

But still… “I’m here,” he said. “You know I’m real.”

“I know you are. I’ve felt your fingers on my hair when you thought I was sleeping.”

Baekhyun let out an incredulous, stifled laugh. “You could have dreamed that.”

“But I did not.”

There was a shift in the air, a shift _in_ _Baekhyun_. The boy wondered if Chanyeol had felt it. He must had done so, because he paused for a second before he raised his right arm, fingers slightly flexed as he reached out - so gingerly, so slowly, so _softly._ Baekhyun had his back to the exit door, cornered but not really trapped. He wanted to run, but he yearned to stay, so he closed his eyes and let it happen.

Chanyeol’s hand felt so warm on his skin. The pads of his fingers were calloused when they grazed his cheek, then his jaw, but there was a softness to his touch, something intrinsically delicate. Chanyeol had always been gentle, after all, when he had to deal with the things he cared for.

“I--” Baekhyun started while he opened his eyes, his voice no more than a whisper. He was so shaken, and Chanyeol looked so mesmerized, staring at him, touching him like he wanted to commit every detail to memory. “Perhaps I should have--”

“Tell me one thing,” Chanyeol said, then. His voice sounded hoarse, lower than ever. “Do your people have any rule, against you and me? Something I need to know?”

Baekhyun could have pushed him away, if he had wanted to. “No.”

“Then there’s one thing I have to ask you. That I need to ask  _ from _ you. Will you listen?”

“Always. Go on.”

“You know I am a dying man,” Chanyeol started. Baekhyun’s fingers grabbed his shirt before he could even realize what he was doing, head tilted up to look at him in alarm. “And you told me before, when I just met you, that I had a right to demand something I wanted. A last wish.”

So it was that. Baekhyun felt so tired, so hopeless, but he would have brought Chanyeol the moon, had he asked for it. He was safe and alive  _ right now, _ after all, but the year would end in less than a month.

“What do you want?” he asked, voice shaking. Chanyeol just smiled.

“A kiss from Death,” he replied. And for a moment he looked like the man Baekhyun had known almost a year ago, the one who had faced his demise with fire in his eyes. Only frailer. Only softer. “Could you do that?”

Baekhyun was material now, tangible for a moment, a human-like presence existing in the world of the living. And he could feel the cold of the winter, the implacable tick of the clock, in sync with the beat of Chanyeol’s heart when he pulled him down to kiss him.

“So that’s all?” he whispered against his lips after a breath, a moment. He still had his back to the door, his hands tangled in the cotton of Chanyeol’s shirt. He felt so lightheaded, so young, more  _ alive _ that he had ever been. “Are you satisfied now?”

The other boy’s smile grew into a full, impish grin. “Are you really asking me that? Of course I’m not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know what this is anymore, but there's about two chapters left to the ending


	9. The Greatest Man Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every person has their own choices to make when the time comes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo do you still remember this fic? I was troubled about how to end it for a while, but since I promised to do it before 2017 came, that's exactly what I'm doing.
> 
> This is chapter 9, and 10 will be the last, and I will try to upload that one around 0:00 on January 1st (Spain time huhu). Let's see if I can! :D
> 
> As usual, there's mentions of death and allusions to suicide, so proceed with care if that triggers you even though there's nothing explicit.

**The Greatest Man Alive**

 

Chanyeol woke up to sunshine on his face and warmth in his bed.

He felt so good, for once, so satiated, so complete - a normal person for once instead of a man running away from Death while it yearned for it to catch him. It was not like he could say that his situation was  _ normal _ , not when a monster had tried to kill him for the second time the night before, nor when his friends thought he had a drug problem and had locked him in his hotel room but it was the Reaper himself who had saved him in the end.

The Reaper. The one he’d kissed. The one who had stayed for him for the night instead of the usual faceless, nameless people who never had the right eyes or lips or laughter.

“Oh my god,” he muttered, feeling suddenly awake. Nervous. Blinking and looking at his left first, then his right.

He had almost expected to be alone - the sheets rumpled but empty, the room as impersonal as hollow as it had been when Jongdae had told him to stay in and sleep - but Baekhyun was there, a pale figure curled up next to him in a wrinkled black shirt, his dark hair a mess and his face so soft.

_ So he does sleep sometimes,  _ he thought, leaning forward to brush the dark locks away from his face. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t for his hand to cleanly pass through Baekhyun’s skin like he was made of thin air. Like always.

“Oh, come on,” he groaned. “Not again now!”

“What…?” murmured Baekhyun, his voice hoarse and laced by sleep as he blinked his eyes open to find a hand literally sank between his eyes. He looked up at him. “Chanyeol?”

“Why are you all ghostly again?”

“Because I am Death?” Baekhyun’s face was all serious as Chanyeol removed his hand, but there was a gleam in his eyes that the other boy had almost forgotten. “I am supposed to be ghostly. The specter of doom, the Grim Reaper, Thanatos incarnated, the Harbinger of--”

“You were still Death last night and you were pretty touchable!”

Baekhyun blinked, interrupted in the middle of his speech with his head turned to stare at him and his hand raised towards the ceiling. He looked endearing. And surprised. And Chanyeol had probably screwed everything up or something, because even if he felt at ease now, it didn’t have to mean that Baekhyun and him had completely made up, or that the other boy was comfortable with the idea of him, of them together, now that the sun was up in the sky again and they were not hurt and raw and desperate anymore.

“I just-- What I meant to say was--”

He was interrupted by the clear sound of laughter, like ripples on calm water, turning the silence into music. “I know what you meant, but my body turning material is a temporary thing you know? It couldn’t last while I was sleeping!”

“And how was I supposed to know that?!”

“You weren’t. Because I didn’t tell you.”

“You’re really nice when you want to.”

“I know. Even though I have the feeling you’re being sarcastic.” Baekhyun grinned at him, getting out of the bed and jumping onto thin air, floating like he always did, his silver cane coming to support him out of nowhere.

“Have you realized that you’re flying around my room in a  _ shirt?” _ Chanyeol called out.

“Well, I am not the only one who looks improper.” Baekhyun scoffed, but he descended nonetheless, falling directly on top of Chanyeol, straddling him. He was weightless over him, a tease of a spirit whispering in his ear. “And anyway, you might be the world’s finest superstar but you’re not the only person here allowed to do fanservice. I have my own fans, you know?”

“And who are they? Cultists in black robes?” Chanyeol reached up for him and grasped air again. He couldn’t help the groan of frustration that left his throat.  _ “Baekhyun,” _ he protested.

“What?” the other boy said, but in the end he obliged. There was no visible change but Chanyeol could feel him - Baekhyun’s weight on the mattress, his shape against him and his breath, warm, against his neck. “Better?” he asked.

“Much better,” muttered Chanyeol, and then he was kissing, all soft, holding back a smile when he felt Baekhyun’s hands on his shoulders, on his nape. He may not have much time left to live, but he sure as hell had some seconds, minutes, hours to spend in all that. He had been an idiot, for sure, but he could still make amends.

“You  _ do _ have a death wish,” whispered Baekhyun then, against his lips. He moved a bit, shifting positions with a sigh until he was half sitting on his lap, head hidden against Chanyeol’s neck, his lips on his skin.

“Well, I try my best.”

Baekhyun was silent for the space of a heartbeat, his voice coming out much softer when he took air to speak. “I am… sorry that I didn’t tell you sooner. That you could actually touch me, if I allowed it. I feel like it was partially my fault, hurting you.”

“Nah, it was not, I just spent the last months of my life being an ass, that’s all.” Chanyeol also paused for a moment, carding his fingers through Baekhyun’s hair, allowing himself to breath calmly for once. He did not have parties to attend to, people to call. That morning was not a moment he wanted to forget, but a memory he wished to keep as long as he could, as he was allowed to. “I have been thinking, you know? Last night while I was waiting for you, and later, when you slept. That I wasn’t to blame for losing my life the first time I was killed. I may not have had everything I wanted, but I was young and I was alive and everything was taken away from me, so unfairly. And I didn’t want to admit it, but even later I was still angry. When you gave life back to me, and when you helped me to achieve my dreams, I should have been grateful but I was so mad. I had everything I used to want, but I wanted all I used to have before. It was like I was suddenly standing at the top of the world and everything I wanted was to jump off and end it.”

He felt Baekhyun tremble against him. “Don’t,” he whispered. “You would be missed.” And then he added, almost like a voiced thought, a muttered prayer. “All of us Reapers would understand that line of thought but-- I don’t want you to be gone like that, even if how you end it is not my choice to make.”

“An end is not what I want, either. Not now. Not anymore. I just told you that I spent all these months being an ass, but I don’t feel like that because of the parties, exactly, or the alcohol, or all those people I used to meet. I do because I got an extra year and I wasted most of it just being angry. The world is never fair; other people don’t even have a choice, and there I was throwing mine away.”

Baekhyun chuckled softly, a short, bittersweet sound. “True that.”

“But I realized last night that I still have a month left, you know? That the monster didn’t get to kill me for a second time, so I have four weeks of remaining time and have to use them. To do what I want to do.”

Baekhyun moved back just a bit to look at him. “To do what?” he asked with a raised eyebrow. “Me?”

“For example. Top one in my list.”

“And then?”

Chanyeol thought about it for a moment. He knew the thought, but he wasn’t still familiar with the words, not yet. And still, they came out as easily as they ever would. “I want to make another song. Or two, three, many more. I want to have a concert on the 31st, and to bow so deep for the audience, to thank them. I want to go out with Jongdae and the others, and have lunch, and listen to their New Year’s resolutions and laugh because we’ll all be aware that they will be breaking them in two weeks. And I want to go to places with you. To amusement parks, and to old CD shops and just… Talk to you like we used to. To introduce you to my friends. I want to be the greatest man alive. So everyone can remember me the way I want to. And then, when the time comes and all is over, I want to choose how to go. Not as a wasted rockstar, or as an ungrateful brat, but as someone who loved and was loved in return.”

Baekhyun’s fingers traced the side of his face, a touch so gentle, so simple and so painfully human. He bit his lip, trapping it between his teeth. “It can be done. It will be,” he whispered. “But. Now that you mention it. Do you think your bandmates would like me?”

“Can they even  _ see _ you?”

“Yes, if I want to?” Baekhyun shrugged, grinning again. “For a couple of hours a day, and as long as I am close enough to you. Because of the bond and all, remember?”

“Well, then they  _ will _ like you. More than they like me, at least. You told me one time that you are more hardcore that I will ever be, and you were right. You’re the hardcore king, the killer of monsters, the Harbinger of whatever it is, and they’ll just love that. What’s more metal than Death, huh?”

Chanyeol was going to say something more, to tell Baekhyun to get dressed and go out with him somewhere,  _ anywhere _ right then, but his words were interrupted by a knock on the door, a familiar voice calling his name carefully, as if not to scare him.

He had forgotten that he still had things to fix, amends to make, but he supposed he could start then and there. The clock was still ticking, after all, as it has always been, and he needed to start looking at Time in the face.

“Hey, Baekhyun, who should I say you are when I introduce you to Jongdae?” he asked. “The Grim Reaper thing may not be very convenient, so what then? My personal guardian? My boyfriend? The voice of my conscience?”

At that, the other boy laughed so loud - a slightly incredulous, delighted laughter - that Chanyeol was sure that even his friend at the other side of the door must have heard. “I kind of failed at the guardian and conscience thing,” he said, “so the other option will do.”

\--

Chanyeol was fast asleep in his room that night when Baekhyun floated up to the hotel roof, feeling so light and, for once, fearless. It was a strange sensation, to feel as weightless inside as he was outside when his body was made of dust and memory.

Junmyeon was already waiting for him, as formal as always and as stressed as ever. He smiled to him when he arrived, however, his eyes warm. “You fulfilled your mission,” he said. “I must congratulate you in the name of the whole Death Department.”

“I killed the monster,” conceded Baekhyun. “But I still don’t know what it was. It came from the public in the venue and rushed towards Chanyeol. Do you know something about it? Do the bosses?”

“They have an idea,” Junmyeon replied. “As far as I’ve been told, it was born from human grief. From remorse, from pain, from resentment. Raw emotion, condensed. I have been told there have been more cases, while you watched your boy. Mainly in big cities, such as this one. It’s a new creature, an evolved form of threat. still dangerous, but we are learning.”

“Does music get them out?” Baekhyun asked. Melody bared the soul, after all, it made people cheer, and scream, and cry when they listened, when they  _ understood _ . It let people mourn, and let out the things that were hidden within them, it united them, for good and bad. Even Chanyeol became a different man when he played, a brighter shade of himself, an unrestrained flame. And he was so glad the fire in him hadn’t died. “Or was it Chanyeol, this time?”

“We still don’t know,” Junmyeon admitted. “But the bosses are happy with your advances. You could keep helping them when the new year starts. Not with field work as you have been doing but with different, higher responsibilities. They instructed me to tell you.”

The city was all bright below them, a moving, living galaxy of streetlights and neon and smoke, populated by people as small as ants. Some of them were already dreaming, safe; others were awake and lonely, feeding their own monsters. As Chanyeol had been, and himself before him.

“So you’re offering me a promotion?” he asked, and Junmyeon nodded. “That’s very nice of you all, but I’m not really sure if I really want to stay in this job anymore.”

Junmyeon blinked in surprise. “You mean--”

“I mean that maybe not now, certainly not in the next month, but after that… I want to go to the Reapers for my Judgement. To go beyond, maybe, if my soul is worth salvation. I think the time has come, for me to be brave. So I’ll be prepared. To try it.”

Junmyeon observed him in silence, and Baekhyun looked back at him, to his stern, handsome face and his ridiculously proper clothes. He decided he was going to miss him when he left.

“I see. I wish you good luck then. It’s a hard step to take, for all of us. Judgement must be faced in solitude, and it is not easy.”

“The burden of one’s faults never is,” muttered Baekhyun, raising his eyes from the sleepless city to the sky. He could see the stars from where he was, even if it was just faintly. “But these things become manageable when you have hope. When you know there’s someone waiting for you at the other side. So well, I’ll try my best. From now on, I always will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! That's it! We're so, so close to the ending!
> 
> So please support me if you liked it and try to comment if you can, so I can be all hyped up and finish the story on time.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who read this story up to this point and sorry for the long wait! ;;
> 
> I love you all :D


	10. Swansong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chanyeol would be with Baekhyun, when the New Year came

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is it, the last chapter, just in time for the end of the year. I really hope you enjoy it.
> 
> I choose not to post any warnings for this chapter but well, I do recommend you to reach the end!
> 
> Also... This day is a bit of a busy one for me, because it's new year's eve and all, so I didn't have time to reply to yesterday's comments before uploading this one. So please don't hate me T0T I will do so tomorrow!

**Swansong**

 

Chanyeol died on December 31st, just before midnight.

He had finished his last song two weeks before and then he had gone to his family for seven more days. He had talked to his mother, hugged his father, told his sister he was proud of her when she informed him about her new job. He hadn’t visited in a while, he told Baekhyun, and the boy just trailed behind him, invisible, and watched him say his goodbyes to that group of good, unsuspecting people.

“I can introduce you to them, if you want?” Chanyeol muttered one night, while Baekhyun wandered around his childhood bedroom, curiously looking at his action figures and his old soft toys, all the little things that had shaped his childhood.

“I would prefer if you don’t,” he replied.  _ I don’t want them to look at the God of Death in the eye, not when he’s taking his son away when he has just started living.  _ “They are not Metal enough to meet the Grim Reaper, I think. Let them enjoy this time with you.”

Of course, Chanyeol had let him be when it came to his family, but Baekhyun couldn’t avoid meeting his friends. It was not like he minded - he had been observing his bandmates for a year and was familiar with the way they laughed too loud when they drank, or with the fond gleam in their eyes when they looked at Chanyeol, so he felt well, welcome and at home, the weight of his humanlike, tangible body much more a blessing than a curse.

“You seem good for him,” Jongdae told him, taking Baekhyun to the side to talk one of the last times they went out together. His voice was heavy with alcohol, but his gaze was clear. “He promised me he would go see a specialist starting January, so he doesn’t lose his way anymore. And you have to make sure he does. He looks the happiest I’ve seen him in years when you’re around. He cares about you.”

“I do too, a lot. So don’t worry, he’ll be fine.”

He didn’t float around the venue that last time, in Chanyeol’s great tour finale. There wouldn’t be a monster coming for him that time, so he played human, stood in the front row and screamed his name, yelled the lyrics of his last song like he wasn’t the only one he knew them, the only person there who had listened to them before and knew what they really meant. And when the swansong ended and Chanyeol bowed so deeply, he held his head high and let the tears go while the whole stadium dissolved into applause.

He cried for the artist. For the man. For the undying legend and the living ghost. For the soul Baekhyun was taking.

There was a New Year’s Party later, with Jongdae and the bandmates and the team, but Chanyeol skipped it with a smile.

“No more fun for me,” he said, shaking his head when Jongdae came by asking. “I have a bit of a headache anyway. Can’t really focus on you guys right now. Besides, I told Baekhyunnie I would be with him when the New Year came, so it’s not like I can skip my promise.”

Baekhyun, beside him, looked down when Jongdae frowned. “You sure you can drive? You could tell him to come if you’re feeling unwell.”

“Nah, I am okay. I am so happy, you know? So I will be fine.” Chanyeol laughed, so loud, so clear. “But before I forget, I have a resolution, for New Year. So we have to make it happen, all together.”

“And what’s that?”

“Make the band bigger, stronger, more well known. Keep it up at the top of the world. We can’t let it flop, after we came all this way. Promise?”

Jongdae’s answer came almost immediately. “You got it, man. First New Year’s Resolution I am gonna keep. Ever.”

Chanyeol was smiling when they left, and still doing it while he started his car, and as he entered the highway.

“It’s almost midnight,” he commented, looking at Baekhyun out of the corner of his eye. The boy felt his gaze on him, swallowed hard.

“I know.”

“Am I in your list this time?”

“Yes.”

“As I wanted to appear?”

The Reapers had owned Baekhyun a favor for his good work. he hadn’t taken their promotion, but had asked for a wish instead. “Car crash just before midnight. You take no one else with you.”

Chanyeol gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. “I did everything I wanted. I had my song. I told everyone I loved that I did.”

“Yeah.”

“Did I tell you, too?”

Baekhyun gazed up to the road. “Of course you did,” he muttered. “I know you do.”

“So, well then,” Chanyeol added. The road bended abruptly before them, barely a hundred of meters away. Baekhyun knew the other boy had to take a turn to the right. He knew that it wouldn’t happen. “I guess this is farewell now. Goodbye, Reaper boy.”

Baekhyun felt his bottom lip tremble. “See you later.”

\--

It all ended in a flash of snow and steel, ice on the road and ambulance lights in the horizon.

They were too late. Park Chanyeol had died one minute before the New Year, so fast that he hadn’t had time to register pain. He was trapped in a mass of tangled irons and burnt plastic, but he had looked almost peaceful where he rested, his head on the steering wheel, his eyes closed.

Baekhyun had seen his soul leave his body, the whole process so different from the first time, when they had met one year ago. His spirit was not the ghost of a lost, confused boy standing next to his body anymore, but a vision of glittering gold, rich, warm light that surrounded Baekhyun in one last caress before it faded into the night, far away, to the Reapers’ realm for Judgement.

“So no pending issues,” Baekhyun whispered. “No scores to settle, no regrets.”

He needed to leave too, he also wanted the light, he craved it, but he had things to do, to  _ see. _

His body was material, as human as it would ever be, after he floated to the hospital and called Jongdae from the waiting room. It was mortal and tangible and exhausted as he waited there for him to arrive, as he held Chanyeol’s friend through his tears and his grief and his disbelief and allowed himself to let go, to scream and to cry until his eyes and throat hurt, like he had never done for anyone, not even for himself before his own end had come.

He had worn his finest dress suit for the funeral, Death Department’s best. He would had made Junmyeon proud, if he had been there to see him, with how formal he looked, how proper. He hadn’t expected Chanyeol’s mother to even suspect who he was, or who he had been to her son, but she had known - she had walked to him and held his hand like he grasped her husband and daughter's.

“I want to believe he was happy. That he was in a very dark place for a while but he came out,” she had whispered to him, so sad and so warm. “That his smiles were honest before the end came. Thanks to you.”

“Not only thanks to me,” Baekhyun replied. “But yeah, they were. I do know..”  _ He looked at Death in the face and grinned just before the crash. _

He left after that, as silently as he had come, and shivered when his fake human body turned intangible again. He had missed the familiar weight of his scythe on his hands, the power that always pulsed from it in waves, and made the cane change to its true form as soon as he summoned it. Up to that moment, his weapon had been more of a companion than a mere tool, but its strength was not something he needed, not anymore.

“So that’s all, old friend,” he said. “One last trip together and it will all be over.”

So he smiled, and gripped it hard, and closed his eyes as he vanished into thin air, back to where the Reapers were waiting for him to face his final Judgement.

\--

_ The world had been pitch black while he lived, darkness without a way out. _

_ It had turned grey when everything had ended, frozen static as he remained as he had been, held still in a place that wasn’t exactly his own anymore. _

_ Now that he had been judged, all shone, bright and white, a tunnel of pure light guiding him somewhere else, a place of yellow and blue and green at the end of the road. _

_ He wanted to advance, to move forward, but he remained frozen in place.  _ Is it here?  _ he thought.  _ Am I really here?

_ There was a figure in the light, a brush-stroke of black and red in the white tunnel - a human shaped shadow, dressed like any rockstar would for their greatest show. And the boy gasped and took a step, then another one and then he was running, so fast that he almost made the other man fall to the ground when he threw his arms around his neck. _

_ “You’re here,” he whispered. “You’re really here.” _

_ “You’re kinda late, though,” he told him. “I was started to get bored, waiting for you.” _

_ Baekhyun smiled. “I had a couple of things to do, remember? But I’m here now, you see? I made it. I crossed beyond.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you know, this fic has been the only one among all my work that hasn't been planned beforehand, so I didn't have a set ending. Not until yesterday, at least, but I do think this was the only way a story such as this could end. And it's really not that much of a sad ending, imo.
> 
> BUT, anyway, this story is over, so I hope you enjoyed the journey up to this point! :D So please let me know what you think in the comments.
> 
> And have a happy New Year, everyone!!! :D


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